FAO Neil Pickup - Tips against left arm spin bowling

Neil is this you that had the struggles against Miss Colvin?

Holly Bowls us Over

Holly Colvin, the youngest player ever to have played Test cricket for England, visited the Dragon on Tuesday. She gave the pupils from A to E Block valuable coaching tips and talked about her route to success. At only 15, Holly lived the schoolboy’s (or schoolgirl’s) dream of helping out at the nets. She joined the England Women’s side for a Test against Australia and helped win the Ashes in 2005 and retain them in 2007-08; she also hit the winning runs in the World Cup. All of this while studying for GCSEs and A-Levels; she is now at Durham University studying natural sciences. The Dragons enjoyed a mixture of fielding and reaction drills, with some batting and bowling, and a Q&A session. An additional highlight was watching Mr Pickup suffer a hatrick when facing her left arm spin.

This is what you get for attempting to launch Test cricketers back over their own head. In my defence, I didn't get bowled, I just missed it twice and then skewed one to point. Not remotely how I would attempt to play in any situation of importance: far more comparable to the seven goals conceded and subsequent red card in the staff v pupils football game the following day...

To tell the truth, I didn't see much of the afternoon as I was busily preoccupied with the banality of patrol duties, so I missed a great deal of the "proper" technical work she did with the older cricketers. My exposure was limited to a 20-minute Q&A with our better U11s late in the afternoon before our head of cricket decided that I needed to have a bat.